This Week’s Must-See Art Events: The Art World Never Shuts Down

We all talk about how the art world shuts down in August, but a brief look at Friday’s schedule shows how much of a fallacy that’s becoming. Bushwick is full of openings that night from Signal’s exhibition of artists to respond to stories penned by three writers to Hood Gallery’s two person show for Tim Long and Jack Shaefer looking at what they call “self-defense prosthetics (canes, slingshots etc.)

It’s also still hot as hell, so we’ve recommended a few summertime screenings. The real trick to dealing with that, though, might be to just get out of the city for a week.

Mon

6Month Space

Will Wheeler: Leashe

This installation is described as a video game avatar we must observe through the storefront windows, 24/7, that is coordinated to the artist’s movements. But the avatar’s actions don’t necessarily correspond to whatever the artist is performing. It kinda sounds like maybe there’s a dog in a storefront? According to the cryptic press release, “The piece is about leaving things at home for too long and living in a cage.”

This is mostly a “must-see” because we’re really curious as to whether or not there’s an actual dog involved.

Tue

Triangle Arts Association

Triangle Open Studios

Our neighbors are having open studios, marking the end of the Summer Residency Season. We’re excited to see the wildly different approaches they’ve taken. James N. Kienitz Wilkins, for example, has transformed his space into a film studio, while Hope Esser has been producing conceptual garments and London-based Lauren Godfrey (pictured) has been creating bespoke interiors and design objects inspired by the people she’s met during her time in New York.

Chinatown Soup

Reverend Jen's Troll Museum Resurrection

Before “gentrification took hold, and our neighborhood’s quirky village of theaters and art stars quickly became a strip mall for douchebags” the Lower East Side was home to a lot of weird stuff. Namely, Reverend Jen’s Troll Museum. The shrine to Troll dolls occupied Jen’s tiny sixth-floor walk up for decades, until she, her chihuahua, and decades worth of troll memorabilia and art were evicted. Now, the museum has been resurrected at Chinatown Soup for a limited time, complete with performances and new artwork.

Wed

Fresh Window Gallery

Andreas Heusser: No Show Museum

Fresh Windows Gallery is hosting the Europe-based No Show Museum, a mobile art space in a converted truck that’s dedicated to art about nothingness. It’s currently hosting the exhibition NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE about “impossible” artworks throughout art history. If you’re curious about the what, how, and why of a mobile museum about nothing, be sure to catch the curatorial talk at 7 PM.

Fri

ArtHelix/SHIM

Closing Reception: Cosmos Pornography and the Flickering Fiction of Place

This is one of those exhibitions with text that we have to re-read five times before it sinks in on a Monday morning. Quantum physics! The post-human! Multiple parallel nature(s) in constant flux! Have no fear though, under some heady theory and philosophical questions, I think the message is essentially a fun one: why obsess over absolutes and “the new” when each person has an individual relationship to the world around us? That can manifest through technological interventions with the natural world to an embrace of camp or even painterly floral-looking abstractions from outlier Kaveri Raina.

Curated by Antoinette Suiter, this show brings together the best and brightest recent grads from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s diverse programs. This is the last chance to catch the show, so be sure to make it! Featuring SAIC alumni:

SIGNAL

JRR & ROY

Curator Hayley Martell asked three writers—Christiana Cefalu, Devin N Morris, and Adele Thibodeaux—to write short stories about the fictional characters “JRR & ROY”. These were then distributed to three performers—Caitlin Baucom, Honey Jernquist, and Quenton Stuckey—as well as sculptors Taylor Black, Dave Eassa, and Irina Jasnowski. All six artists are making some piece about the stories the writers came up with. What will this exhibition look like? We have no idea, but Dave Eassa’s narrative painterly installations are always pretty fun, so we have high hopes.

Hood Gallery

Waterfront Hood: Arm's Length and 'office building,' a film screening by Ursula Sommer

Waterfront, the Hudson Valley residency/curatorial project focused on “vacation art” that I visited last summer, is presenting a two person show from Tim Long and Jack Shaefer: Arm’s Length at Bushwick’s Hood Gallery. The artists are looking at self-defense prosthetics as they relate to their own bodies—exhibiting canes and slingshots that extend the user’s wingspan in close-quarters combat. Also on view, Ursula Sommer’s film “office building,” a short film about the mundane corporate blandscape.

Kayrock Screenprinting

Conrad Guevara: Sapal

Take a look at 16 abstract paintings complete with sticks, stems, pits and seeds by Conrad Guevara. Each are inspired by coconut pulp— the dry, yet edible remains of the fruit after the rest of it has been harvested. The point seems to be to test the limits of resource extraction, but perhaps also paint itself, which is always being re-evaluated.

Sat

Anthology Film Archives

Surveillance: Short Film Program

In the summer, many of us artsy types try to beat the heat by spending a bunch of time in a dark theatre. It’s a tried and true method, though it’s good to be picky. (Note, we haven’t recommended Gremlins 2, which readers can go see at another storied institution this Saturday. Seriously.) That’s why we’re recommending Anthology Film Archives Surveillance series, which seems timely in light of all the recent hacking that’s gone on and boasts a roster of three artists we’ve covered more than once here at AFC.

Deborah Stratman’s IN ORDER NOT TO BE HERE, explores surveillance in the context of suburban communities. Sophie Calle’s UNFINISHED uses 15 years of ATM surveillance footage as its source and Harun Farocke’s I THOUGHT I WAS SEEING CONVICTS overlays different surveillance footage from a maximum security prison.

Don’t expect to feel happy after getting out of this screening. Learning doesn’t always feel good.